


leave your bags in the car, keep it running

by ksveins



Category: Crazy Rich Asians (2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/M, I hate happy endings, my otp is me x sadness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-28
Updated: 2019-01-28
Packaged: 2019-10-18 09:10:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17578001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ksveins/pseuds/ksveins
Summary: Rachel goes home.





	leave your bags in the car, keep it running

Rachel goes home. She shoves herself into the window seat of a cramped Boeing 747 and watches Singapore grow smaller and smaller until the skyscrapers look like tiny, gleaming needles; until the island has disappeared altogether, ocean blues and jungle greens and concrete yellows washed out by the hazy smear of clouds at cruising altitude. She spends 16 hours watching sad period dramas on the in-flight entertainment platform and only cries through 8 of them.

Thirty minutes into _Atonement_ , she falls asleep. When she wakes up, Robbie and Cecilia are both dead, there’s a crick in the left side of her neck, and New York City is a living thing underneath them: swarms of yellow taxi-cabs moving through the latticed streets; indistinct neon lights and billboards cutting through the smog; the whole city growing, growing, growing, until the plane is swallowed by it altogether.

_The local time is 7:06 p.m.,_ the pilot says, after they’ve landed. Some of the passengers are clapping; most just look vaguely nauseous. _If this is home, welcome back._  

*

She goes back to teaching the following Monday. Rachel has always been pragmatic – that’s the real bitch of it, she thinks, being branded a simpering idealist when she’s the first to make the practical call – and she knows the healing power of good, old-fashioned, mind-numbing busyness. Besides, Rachel is not, in fact, a member of the Taiwanese packing peanut Chus or the Shanghai plastics Chus or the pan-Asian dildo empire Chus, and thus does not have the money to take a six-month-long hike up the Pacific Crest Trail or jaunt through Europe for a summer in the name of spiritual – emotional – romantic rejuvenation. And so:

She grades problem sets. Visits her mother. Folds her laundry. Beats some more undergrads at poker. Pops an Ambien on nights when the left side of the bed feels cavernous, like negative space..   

_It’s fine_ , she thinks. _It’s all fine._     

*

Then comes a night when it is all very much not fine.

It’s very silly, really: It’s 1 in the morning on a Saturday, and she’s taking the A train back to her apartment. She’s tipsy, but not drunk; scrolling through a Buzzfeed article that features a wide array of instruments being played by kittens. It’s very cute. Rachel starts to think very seriously about getting a cat for her own apartment – they make good pets, she’s heard. Low maintenance. Independent. And not particularly liable to hide their family’s multi-billion dollar real estate businesses from their significant others until their relationship collapses underneath the weight of it.  

So yes – a cat. She likes the Persians: their sweet, squashed faces; the almost impossible volume of fur. Or perhaps a Maine Coon, or perhaps a tabby. She doesn’t need to decide tonight.  

A couple gets onto the train at High Street. They are wrapped up in each other; they are deeply in love. It’s nothing obvious that gives it away – they don’t sit in each other’s laps or call each other pet names or stand kissing open-mouthed while the train rattles through the tunnels. But Rachel can tell that they are deeply in love because of the way that they look at each other – rather, the way that they don’t look at anything _other_ than each other; like everything else in the world is just a backdrop setting for the scene shared between the two of them.  

Rachel manages to hold it together until she gets off of the train and out of the subway station, and then she cries the entire walk home. The rest of the pedestrians on the street at half past 1 barely spare her a glance, a fact that both deeply reassures and angers her; for a moment, she is wildly, desperately determined to move the deep South, Alabama or Texas or Louisiana or somewhere like that, where _someone_ would have stopped and asked her if she needed any help. But she doesn’t need any help, she tells herself, firmly. She needs to go home and go to bed.  

*

When she wakes up the next morning, her eyes are red and puffy and her head hurts and she cracks her phone screen throwing it across the room when her alarm goes off.

She takes it to the Apple Store and pays $200 dollars for a tall, lanky engineer named Ian to fix it. It takes ten minutes.

Then she goes back to grading. 

*

There is a series of bad dates, and of unmemorable one-night stands. A high school teacher, a therapist, a salesman at a pharmaceutical company. An accountant who got married early and then divorced early. An entrepreneur who is “not looking for anything serious.” The dates are fun enough and they remind her that she is desirable, which she supposes is a good thing, but the trouble is that they don’t do much else. After drinks, or dinner, or perfunctory morning-after goodbyes, she goes home and lies in her bed and stares at the ceiling and feels an alarming lack of excitement or giddiness or even regret – in fact, she feels the _absence_ of any of those emotions as an emotion in and of itself, one that quickly becomes frustration, which becomes anger, which becomes deleting all of her dating apps until the next weekend, when boredom and a nagging fear that she will never find love again compel her to download them again.

This is more or less how the rest of the year passes.     

*

She keeps in touch with Astrid: a text here and there, asking after Oliver or linking to a _Wall Street Journal_ article about the growth of small businesses in Singapore. Nick is conspicuously absent from their conversations, as is Michael; there is the distinct feeling that for every text that the two exchange, there is another, second conversation being had, comprised entirely of their omissions.

She likes Astrid – thinks that she is smart and graceful and kind – and she would like to remain friends. But it’s a hard way to get to know someone.  

*

In the winter, she hears from a friend of a friend at a party thrown by a post-doc that one of the history professors quit and left behind an unfilled vacancy. _A tenure track position_! she says, and Rachel wonders if it’s a sign of aging that the girl’s unrestrained enthusiasm leaves her more tired than inspired. _One of the younger ones, too,_ her friend says, frowning like she can’t imagine why a person in the late 20s would want to do anything other than work their way up the academic ladder.

_I heard all about that_ , one of the other girls said. _Turns out he’s rich. Like,_ really _rich. Like,_ CRAZY _rich._

The girls laugh. Rachel excuses herself to get a drink. She gets one, and then another, and then goes home.  

*

Rachel joins a mahjong club. She’s been itching to play, and the undergrads haven’t gotten any better at poker since she started teaching Intro to Game Theory four semesters ago. She needs something new. She needs a challenge.

The mahjong club meets every Sunday afternoon at 4 p.m. in a community center in Queens. On her first trip there, she winds up at a table with two Jessicas and a Liuyang. The Jessicas are both 25-year-old Californian transplants with the exact same hairstyle – blonde ombres, and Rachel is flabbergasted to learn that Jessica the First flies back to California ever two months just to see her stylist – but insist that they had never met each other before they both started coming to the club last year. Liuyang is a born-and-bred New Yorker, Queens to the bone, and proves it by letting Rachel win the first two matches and then cleaning everyone out for the rest of the afternoon. Rachel doesn’t realize how badly she’s been played until she’s eating dinner at her apartment, replaying the games in her head, and then – well. She’d be angry if she weren’t so impressed.

The four of them go out to dinner one evening in February and Rachel is surprised at how easy the conversation flows, how it feels like they’ve really gotten to know each other despite the fact that the words _pong_ and _chi_ have comprised 50% of their exchanges to date. It feels natural: Liuyang in front, leading them through Chinatown’s snow-logged back alleys to the restaurant; the Jessicas flanking Rachel’s sides, groaning about how in California it’d be 75 degrees by now.

This was one good thing that came out of Singapore, she decides: this is the silver lining of that trip. And she almost believes herself.  

*

In March, Nick Young gets engaged.

Rachel gets the news in a text from Astrid: _Hey_ , _know we haven’t talked in a while, but wanted to shoot you a text. Nick got engaged. It’ll be in the Journal tomorrow, but didn’t want you to find out from the papers. Call if you want to talk about it. Call even if you don’t! I miss you. Hope all’s well._

The paper is in the racks in the front of her building by the time she gets to work the next morning, and, as promised, there’s Nick: smiling blissfully up at her in black-and-white on page 2. The girl is a few inches shorter than Nick, wearing a clean cut sheath dress for the photo shoot, her long black hair styled in loose waves. Pretty. Rachel is happy for them, she thinks, carefully. But she throws the newspaper into recycling the second she’s done reading it and cancels her office hours that afternoon, just in case she needs to cry – which, as it turns out, she does.

Those are the days she is most grateful for her anonymity. She spends days wandering the streets of Manhattan, drowning her feelings in retail therapy and copious amounts of bubble tea while every sordid and not-so-sordid detail about Nick’s fiancée is dredged up in tabloids and online gossip sites. Her name is _Mina Li_ , and depending on what day of the week it is and what corner of the internet you’re browsing, she is either a well-respected Columbia grad or a gold-digging whore who spent her college days going on coke-fueled benders and participating in the occasional Ivy League threesome. 

“Did you see that Nick Young got engaged?” Jessica the Second says, the next Sunday at mahjong.

“To the daughter of a Chinese electronics magnate,” Liuyang says. She looks bored, which is how she usually looks right before she throws down her tiles and demands an unreasonable number of chips from everyone.  

“Can you _imagine_?” Jessica the First says. “What that must be like? I heard they have a palace in the jungle. I heard they throw these ridiculous parties and if you’re not wearing Dolce they won’t let you through the door. I heard his mom is—”

“ _Pong_ ,” Rachel says, forcefully, even though she had meant to save the two eights as a pair.

*

Around one year after what she has begun thinking of as The Great Singapore Fiasco, she goes out with a manager at a marketing agency named Peter. They go to a dive bar in Manhattan where Rachel gets spectacularly drunk off of mezcal margaritas; then they go to his apartment where Rachel sleeps with him, because why not? She doubts they’ll see each other again: he is pretty explicitly Not Her Type.

The sex is fine but not spectacular – as drunk as she is, she thinks he’s drunker; there’s a miscommunication while they’re switching positions and she winds up smashing her head against the headboard. “It’s fine, it’s fine,” she says, cutting off his endless apologies; “Some people find that sort of thing hot, you know.”

“ _Concussions_?” he says, incredulous, but doesn’t protest when she flips the two of them so that she’s on top.

In the morning, he makes her coffee and throws back double the recommended dose of aspirin while looking like he can’t decide whether he’s more pleased with himself or mortified. She likes it – that look – and she is bizarrely endeared by his kitchen, which has a blue tiled backsplash and a vase full of daisies on the counter.

“Didn’t take you as a flowers kind of guy,” she says.

“I guess we’ve both surprised each other over the last 12 hours,” he says, smirking slightly, and she thinks – _huh._  

She gets a text from him a week and a half later. “9 days later, and I’ve finally recovered from my hangover,” it says. “Interested in round 2 tonight?” And almost to her surprise, she is.  

*

She isn’t sure when it becomes serious. These sorts of things never make easy sense, in hindsight – is it the night he comes over to her apartment for no reason other than to cook dinner together and do the latest crossword puzzle? The Saturday afternoon she spends watching the Manchester vs. Liverpool game with him despite having no interest at all in soccer? The ski trip they take over a long weekend in February, which ends with an actual concussion? The first time she tries to teach him mahjong?

They’re not teenagers; they’re not playing games with each other; there’s no need for The Conversation or even _a_ Conversation. But one day she wakes up, and she’s not surprised when Peter stirs next to her, waking up at her movement; or when he ambles over to her closet, still sleep-drunk, and pulls out one of his shirts. He knows how she prefers her eggs in the morning, and she knows that if he doesn’t get to the gym by 10 a.m., he’ll write the entire day off as a lost cause. “Should I pick anything up on the way back?” he asks. “Do we need to bring anything for Jessica’s party?”

“Just a bottle of wine, I think,” she says, and he’s out the door before she can tell him that he’s put his shirt on inside-out.

*

Peter’s parents live in a three-bedroom house on the outskirts of Chicago. They have a labradoodle named Curly and when Rachel visits them for Christmas, they apologize profusely for not having a guest bedroom made up for her. _You’ll have to share with Peter_ , his mother says, conspiratorially, as if that’s the worst thing in the world.

Thanksgiving is uneventful. Peter’s sister is 21, finishing up a degree in journalism at the University of Connecticut, hopelessly stressed about the future in the way that all people her age seem to be these days. His mother says grace before they eat, which is something unexpected: Peter had told her that he was raised Catholic, but not _this_ Catholic. They ask her about her job, why she likes economics, how she knew she wanted to be a professor. They ask her about her parents. After dinner, the adults watch _A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving_ while Peter’s four nieces and nephews tear each other to pieces over a game of Monopoly.

On the flight home, she bursts into tears the moment Peter falls asleep, though she isn’t entirely sure why. 

*

One day, Nick appears.

She’s in the middle of her routine Saturday run through Central Park. It’s the first day over 40 degrees since winter started back in October, and she’s equal parts grateful and resigned: With the warm weather come the tourists; with the tourists come the noise and the litter and, worst of all, the slow walkers, lined up in rows, taking up the entire sidewalk.

Nick is wearing a gray T-shirt, dark jeans, a brown leather jacket. Not a hair out of place.

Sitting by the goddamn fountain.

She rips out her headphones and marches over.

“Nick?” she says.

“Rachel,” he says. A statement, not a question, which means—

“What are you doing here?” she says. “How did you _find_ me?”

“Rachel,” he says, and now there’s a smile tugging at the corner of his lips. “We lived together. For _years_. I’ve been on this run with you!”

“God,” she says, more to herself than to Nick: _Has it really been that long_? She counts the years: _1, 2, 3 since Singapore_ , and the fact of it stuns her, renders her temporarily speechless.

“Congratulations are in order, I suppose,” she says, eventually, and though she doesn’t mean it to wound, she doesn’t exactly feel bad when he winces.

“That’s actually what I came here to talk about,” Nick says.

Rachel doesn’t respond.

“I–” Nick starts, and then cuts off. He looks like he wants her to say something. She doesn’t.

“It was unfair, what I did to you,” Nick finally says.  

“Yes,” Rachel says. She still can’t believe that he’s here. “But – you’re going to be married. In a month! I saw it on the news. I saw it on _CNN._ ”

“Rachel,” Nick says. He takes her by the hand, here in the middle of Central Park, in the middle of April, in the middle of the morning, runners and dog-walkers and couples and tourists milling by all around them. The snow is melting. The birds are chirping. The trees have been green for less than a week, but they are incandescent with life. Spring comes slow, here in the Northeast, but when it comes, it’s brilliant. It’s blinding.

“Rachel,” Nick says, “It was unfair, and it was – wrong. I was wrong. I thought that love was something replaceable in a way that family would never be, but I was wrong. It isn’t. You aren’t. And I know that now. And – if you wanted me. If you _still_ want me. I would run away with you. I would leave it all behind.”

“Nick—” Rachel says, and then words fail her.

“Nick, you can’t—” she tries again, and for a moment she experiences a wild, totally inappropriate urge to burst into laughter. He can, is the thing. He can, and he would, because it’s what he wants, and Nick has never had to think about anything other than what he wants. Nick has always been like this – ruthlessly determined and hopelessly naïve in equal parts – and maybe that’s what drew her to him in the first place. A minor miracle, it always seemed to her, and with him in front of her now she feels that same awe all over again: That someone could be so firm in their conviction that the world well and truly belonged to them.  

“Thank you,” Rachel says. “Thank you for apologizing. I hope the wedding goes well. I hope the marriage is – happy.” And she goes home.

**Author's Note:**

> title from portland, maine, by donovan woods


End file.
